The present invention concerns a computerized system and method for paginating printed directories. Typically pages to be reproduced by printing contain several items of different types, such as editorial text, diagrams, advertising, lists, tables, pictures, and so on which must all be fitted into the rigid two-dimensional format of the page. There are usually fixed rules, guidelines or a recommended "house-style" to control the positioning and formatting of each item on the page. In the past, pagination was a manual process, but now with the help of computers it is being automated. In newspapers, for example, software has been developed to allow the pagination and formatting to be done by computer page-by-page. This invention is directed to special problems of directory or catalogue composition.
Telephone directories present complex problems related to the placing of advertisements within certain classifications and with the serial positioning extending across many pages of the complete directory. Two alternative approaches of paginating such directories with computer assistance are generally known to the art. The example of a "Yellow Pages" telephone directory will be used to illustrate these prior art alternatives.
This first approach consists of preparing an exhaustive list of all allowable patterns within the rules or "house style" of the user or publisher. The computer program scrolls through the incoming data to find the best fit for each page. The best fit is usually specified as minimum waste or filler. For example, the page may consist of four vertical columns. Display advertising may be one sixth, a third, half or two-thirds of the area of the page and may extend across one, two, three or all four columns the full length of the page in any number of the columns or for any portion of their length. The directory will also contain listings, names and addresses of telephone subscribers, plus specialist items marking the beginning of a new business classification, e.g., "Transport". All of these entries must be positioned in the correct sequence.
The raw material is accumulated in a computer data file in a basic sequence of classifications with the listings and advertising within each classification also in sequence. The first approach, referred to here as the Pattern Matching Approach, takes this information and, on a page-by-page basis, organizes it into what may be many hundreds of alternative page layout patterns to find the one that leads to the least waste. Very often the data does not fit exactly in the page if all the rules are followed and so gaps appear between some of the items. These gaps, whether they are left empty or filled with some stock message, are waste as far as book production costs are concerned.
The disadvantages of this matching approach are (1) lack of flexibility, since any change in the range of book items, the page format or the rules requires that the process be completely redone; and (2) the process uses substantial computer time and may need a long batch run of many hours for a 2000 page directory. The Pattern Matching pagination program is therefore too cumbersome and expensive to use as a modelling tool to preview books at various stages of assembly or, for example, to measure the costs of various options on rules and items.
As an alternative to the Pattern Matching Approach other systems use a rule-based, penalty-point scoring system. Such a system tries all the possible arrangements of entries and assigns rule-based penalty points to each arrangement based on the extent of its deviation from the rules. The house style rules are used to develop the penalty-point scoring system. The best arrangement is selected based on a minimum number of penalty points. This type of system in practice, however, usually requires manual intervention to inspect decisions made by the software and to manually select the final arrangement in difficult cases.
The Penalty-Point System involves the management of a very complex set of data files which results in poor performance in terms of time and computer resources. Each new feature or feature change requires reprogramming. Furthermore, the output of the Penalty-Point system is variable in terms of strict adherence to the rules as it depends on human interventions made during each run.
This invention provides a computer process and system for paginating directories and similar publications which overcomes the problems of the Pattern Matching and Penalty-Point Systems of the prior art.